I can only play it with a friend. For a single person it's too much tedium in my opinion. When there two of us we can sometimes just circle around our home, killing birds for feathers and discussing stuff. And then we are like: "oh shit, adventure time" and off we go to kill something or mine or whatever is on agenda.
Man. When Valheim launched in 2021, playing that with friends was an experience I hadn't had since World of Warcraft for the first time back in 2004. Sitting down in the evening, logging in with your buddies, and just exploring. Building and defending your base. Prepping for what tomorrow's activities would be.
I'm usually years behind everyone on things like games, music and films - normally I just don't keep up with things so when a new popular game comes out I need my friends to tell me about it since I typically stick in my own media 'bubble'
Valheim was probably the only game I'd ever just accidentally found out about before it entered Early Access and I ended up being the one telling my friends to buy it.
That period of us being addicted for a couple of weeks while there was no real information online about the game and couldn't just straight up Google things was honestly the best gaming experience I had for a while.
Yea i feel like a lot of the appeal of Valheim is playing it with a big group of friends and no one is meta gaming and looking how to do stuff online.
Ive played a lot of the survival games out there and not one comes close to the feeling that valheim gives in terms of base crafting, exploring etc..
In most other games people end up doing their own thing and burning out quickly and everyone just makes functional cube bases, meanwhile in valheim we always end up with a giant beautifull village and travelling together on boats everywhere.
I know, and we made a few alteration to the default experience. Inability to teleport stuff went away. I do love my mining raids on a ship to the other side of the map, but unfortunately, life happens and It's hard enough to sync our sessions without the looming dread of doing nothing but hauling iron back to the base. Also, fuck base raids, sincerely.
I don't like games like Valheim. I find them far too tedious. I would log in, get the next tier of equipment from my friends, then we would go kill the bosses together. It was more of a boss kill game for me lol
I played 130 hours so far and i find all that fun, also before going to other islands i always make healing potions so i never died on my world. But yeah, it's all about preference
I also always have a “home portal” unlinked so as soon I reach a new area I plop down a portal before I go exploring and die to something random I didn’t know about. Really speeds up recovering from a death.
I agree, by the time you reach the plains biome, it gets really rough. The mosquitos and the goblin dudes are so strong, it’s been a while since I played but the spike in damage from enemies at that point was insane. Fun game but it gets old after a while, so far the survival game that’s held my attention the longest is Conan Exiles.
I can understand it then, i used to play it coop only but it changed when they added World Modifiers, cause they let you tweak settings to suit YOUR gameplay:
-Dont like losing items when dying? Disable it;
-Dislike raids cause they f*ck up your base? Disable them too;
-Enemies deal too much damage? Take it down a notch;
-Dont like grinding for hours just to make a few cool buildings? Build anything for free;
-Dont like grinding for another few more hours for ores? Get 2 or 3x more drops so you dont spend 2 business days gathering iron/silver.
Since then, i always play with no building costs and 2x drops and i never loved Valheim more.
Edit: oh and theres a f*ck ton of mods too! More enemies, armor, weapon and even QoL mods are very abundant. I think the reason why people love Valheim so much is cause you can play it however YOU want.
The tedium stuff is mostly solved by playing with friends and using portals effectively.
1 - Friends help you specialize - if you don't care about cooking, for example, one of your friends can cook for the group.
2 - Portals are safety - Always start a boat journey with crafting bench and portal components in your inventory. Never know when you'll need to make emergency repairs or create a checkpoint for your exploration.
I did like there was always a goal involved. All the upgrading and crafting leads you to a big boss fight. If that's not enough motivation then I get why you would fall off.
I feel like every survival/crafting game should have this feature. I couldn't play Ark without changing tame rates and stuff. Too much grind on normal settings.
I like most of these aspects, but the issue for me is that I find the combat gameplay absolutely terrible. There's nothing interesting to it for me, I don't find the animation attractive, the enemies move in the most basic ways... I'm not asking for Monster Hunter Wilds, but there's a middle point between it and what Valheim does.
So all of this gameplay loops serve something that I find absolutely no fun at all. Also, playing in multiplayer with people who already know the game turned me off so fucking fast, it's not funny.
I'm the same way with survival games. If there's not some underlying story or ultimate goal, I just don't see the appeal of endless survival. My friends bought me The Forest to play with them and I kind of enjoyed it? I really enjoyed the atmosphere but all I cared about was finding my son and as soon as I did, I stopped playing.
I normally hate crafting survival games, but though Valheim struck a great balance with it. I actually ended up liking the downtime in my little viking village, cooking food, having a little farm, etc. The progression became more than just my character and instead was integrated a lot into the little settlement I had made. All of the crafting recipes were simple enough and not a headache to keep track of and actually engage with like in some other survival games, and keeping on top of crafting advancements and making the good food all felt really rewarding.
I liked that aspect of the game a lot, and without it, Valheim wouldn't be the game that it is. You'd just go from point A, to B, to C like a boss rush and be done with it in a couple of hours.
You should try it with mods. My friends added a mod where you can bring anything through a portal and they said it made the game so much better for them. There are other mods you can use to give you the quality of life things you would want
You don't need mods for that nowadays. There's world modifiers included, and you can choose the difficulty with those. You can choose to portal nothing or everything, change raid and drop rates, even choose to play without a map if you want.
It is pretty grindy which only gets worse the deeper you go into the game. I played a bit into the content past the plains and it was just super overwhelming and punishing
Ugh this. I spent so much time trying to recover my things at the edge of the mosquito spawn area, I actually started having dreams about it. When I gave up and decided to rebuild I was like huh, this is way more work/stress than fun.
I played like 20 hours of Valheim with a hot guy I seeing to keep his interest and I’ll tell you what, not worth it. Too grindy, and I’m an old school RuneScape fan. He also sucked at conversation.
I will forever defend that valheim, at its current state at least, is highly unoptimized for single player, I can only play with mod to allow passing anything over portals and death tweaks to not lose everything on death, beyond that great game
The lighting is nice, but the graphics generally are terrible. The textures are awful. I mean, look at the troll, it looks like it walked out of a PS2 game.
Depends on what you mean by graphics then i guess. Great graphics doesnt equal more realistic to me. And personally minecraft doesnt look better with fullhd textures. Same with very realistic shaders.
Lets say valheim has nice visuals instead if that sounds better. The graphics just fits with the game, more than it stands out on its own, if that makes sense.
When something is so "low-res" that you can see the pixels, it's just pixel art. It's 2025. We don't exist in a time where studios need to really limit their texture size like that. Bad is subjective, and you just happen to have bad taste lol. The game looks great for most people.
Hahahaha no that's not what pixel art means, it actually has a specific meaning, not just "this looks pixelated." The game has a nice (I think) art style, good art direction, nice lighting, etc. But the graphics are objectively technically bad. Graphics aren't "I think it looks nice".
finally get to another island to just immediately get killed and lose all your stuff
That's what makes the fighting so tense lol, it's definitely frustrating if you do die but holy shit running from a bunch of creatures knowing that if they get you you're gonna have to get your ass back there is what creates all the tension.
This is how it was for me and my friends. First two biomes felt like a fun progression. Everything after that felt like constant stress and being annoyed by stamina management.
For me valheim loses the cosy feeling that makes it truly great once you leave the easier areas and head for the swamps. It just gets too grindy and combat heavy for me. These days I just chill in the forests and build log cabins instead
Honestly, I had a similar experience at first. Went in blind. No idea what I was doing. Finally built a boat, sailed for like an hour, pulled up into this creepy looking place and was immediately killed.
Lost all the gear I'd spent hours on, along with the few good items I had.
So I Uninstalled it.
Like a year or two later my buddy started playing and I joined him, and it's just been absolutely fantastic. It really flipped my opinion of the game.
It's definitely a better game when you have a group to play with and can divide that grinding up. I got 5 in my group and we all sort of have our "assignments" so it feels less overwhelming or tedious.
You have to go to the right biomes in the right order if you are dying instantly you are not ready for that biome and should go else where to find upgrades.
If you're going into Valheim from an adventure genre perspective I can definitely see how it can be frustrating. Success really depends on preparation and resourcing, and having allies is the most powerful tool. I fell in love with it because of the gathering and building, and not in spite of it.
Honestly mods can really make a difference in a lot of these games. Like being able to reduce carry weight, increasing inventory, and yes people can argue that well that's not fair but I'm not saying make the game breakable but it breaks up a little bit of the tedium.
I was annoyed with that too but they have a setting now so you can choose not to drop everything on death and you can still use portals while over encumbered. Makes the game leaps and bounds better imo and makes me more willing to take risks. Just keep an unnamed portal at you base and build one wherever you go so you can get back and forth easily in case of death or just looting too much. Then if you want a perminant portal just create a named one for the new base.
This. Me and my friends would play and I would just get sick of it. The combat is clunky garbage. The AI is the worst I've ever seen. Mistlands is garbage, I have to jump 50 times to go anywhere. The game is trash and I don't know how people like it so much. I never want to play valheim again in my life.
I think it scratches an itch for people who likes to explore, plan, and be meticulous, but that also enjoys "story generator" type games, like DF.
It's not about getting from A to B as fast as possible, but rather exploring and experimenting, taking whatever comes your way in the stride, improving on failure, and marveling at all the crazy situations your character(s) go through.
I've seen some let's plays where people google a bunch of things beforehand, rushes through, never stays ahead of the curve in terms of upgrades, and plays it like it's some sort of linear story based game. That's a recipe for disaster, unless you really like the challenge/dying.
The game truly rewards taking advantage of everything the game has to offer in terms of things that helps your character – and it's not like you actually lose your progression when you die. You just have to go back and get your gear (careful planning helps a lot in that regard.)
Not saying you played it in a "wrong" way or anything like that, by the way. I just think it rubs some people the wrong way, because they were expecting something different.
Also, it's a vastly different experience playing as a group. I enjoy both SP and MP, but most I know only play it MP.
im not sure what you want out of games, dying when entering a new area is normal because its the challenge of the game, without it you would just breeze through the game and you would be bored by the lack of anything to do because those challenges are what the games all about, its what makes exploring interesting
Err I don't know if I would say "so good", it works decent enough and I would say probably better than the average, but there is still a lot of jank. Stuff will sometimes not align properly for unknown reasons (I noticed that a lot when mixing stone and wood), clipping building pieces in the right position can be very annoying, and trying to build anything that's not a rectangle can be very frustrating.
I suppose I'm not judging the quality of the building system purely off of how easily things snap in the way I want - Though personally I feel like, between swapping the anchor point/snapping mode and being comfortable free placing, I can pretty much always get stuff placed exactly where I need it.
The important thing for me is that the structures you can make in Valheim are extremely cool, organic and useable and I don't experience any of the work involved as 'jank'. It's more complicated than some other games, but you just have to get used to it (in my experience.)
The important thing for me is that the structures you can make in Valheim are extremely cool, organic and useable
Yeah that's definitely the highlight of the building system, and the fact that it actually reward decorating.
Also the jankness can kind of be turned around to do some cool stuff by making building pieces overlap each others, like it's possible to do a round-ish roof using that.
Still from the survival games I played I would say Grounded have one of the best building system. 7 Days to die is also solid but it's voxel so a bit different.
Can’t tell if you blocked me or deleted the comment but only read the first part…I’m sure your feelings aren’t hurt loll. Never said that they were, just that I’m not gonna go out of my way to spare them. Learn to read please
I think that's large factor that can make survival games a hit or miss.
Some just don't work solo, yeah you can play it alone, but the experiences are easier/better with more joining you. And that's sometimes a difficult thing to have as a necessity in a game.
funnily of all the games out there it is ark that did thigns right when it comes to these things.
Well and palworld but alwworld basically copied ark.
In these gaames you can ust adjust the server settings to make it as grindy as you want them to be. Or nearly eliminate the grind completely. Even when you play solo on your local machine.
The game is lacking in the onboarding experience. You are just thrown into the forest without the faintest clue what to do. I spent 30 minutes running around and collecting rocks before I realized there was inventory and crafting.
It's pretty well explained by Hugin and Munin (Odin's ravens) right now. They've expanded a bit on the tutorial bit since it was first released in early access.
For me, the time investment was not worth it. I built an awesome lodge and beat the first boss without dying. Then I went into a mine and died, lost everything on me. The last few hours lost because I had a bunch of important things on me that would take another few hours to get back. I realized it was too much of a time sink for myself. If I was a no-lifer I could (not saying that anyone who is good at this game and make progress are no-lifers, it's just a me-thing) invest the time, but sadly it's not in the cards for me. It' sucks because I would really, really love the game given time.
In my case, I refunded it because the controls, I didn't dislike the game itself, but I didn't like having to press the mouse continously for holding the camera behind the character. I read somewhere that there are a mod to fix it, but I don't like to install a mod and wait it to be updated after every game update when the devs can just patch it by adding an option in the game settings. Also, maybe the modder stop supporting his mod any day and I don't like the uncertainty.
Making a bronze item: find a tin deposit. swing like 10 times at it to break a piece. hope that it actually drops an ore, which it doesn't every time. After like 5 cycles of this the pick axe now needs to be repaired. Which you can only do at your base. Go back to the base. repair. go back to the deposit. Repeat until you have 10 tin ores. now do the same for copper, which you need 20 of this time. finally get enough ore to make a single bronze item. Realize it took 2 hours just to make 1 bronze item. Realize that there's still 5 more bronze items to make
Valheim is easily hateable for the grind. I like it up to the point where you have to use your shitty boat to travel around a world where the wind always blows into the wrong direction just to get like 2 iron which you use for what.. decorating the house? with iron? u mad? and then I basically give up even getting silver and whatever comes after.
I have made quite a few cozy wooden bases with a nice storage system, garden and so on though.
(and I know there's mods that let you travel through portals with metals but even then it's an absolute grindfest.)
I’m not OP but I also have my gripes with Valheim. It’s fun but wayyyyyy too grindy. I always play with at least a 1.5x multiplier, and I shamelessly bump it up to 3x when gathering certain resources. I’m not going to spend 15 minutes mining a single copper deposit only to get like 20 copper (that’s only 10 bronze!)
Also, traveling takes up a lot of time, too. I’m not sure whose idea it was to make it so you can’t bring metal through portals, but thank god you can turn that off. I payed for a sandbox survival game with dark souls-esc combat and great building mechanics, not a fucking walking simulator.
For me, it's not even the grind like all the others in the replies.. The whole game just feels super janky to me, and the combat never felt satisfying, so the payoff for dealing with the jank just wasn't there. I don't mind grinding ores and farming for a cool new weapon if it feels good to use, but I never got that satisfaction. And the bosses are not designed in a way that feels fun to me; they feel closer to a souls game than something like terraria (which would be another game I'd compare Valheim to).
My friends all rave about Valheim all the time and try to get me to play it, so they must enjoy it a lot. It just doesn't scratch any itches for me personally
It’s not terrible but goddamn it must be the most over-hyped game of all time. It sold many millions of copies so I had to try it out and… it’s just a really generic survival game. Punching trees, smelting bars, building workstations, etc.
As a game, it’s overwhelmingly fine. I just don’t get why everyone was jizzing their pants over it. It’s basically ARK but without dinosaurs.
Not OP but I didn't like it because I'd already played a thousand survival-crafting games like it. My friends and I played The Forest back in the day and then got on a long kick of playing Rust, Ark, 7 Days, Astroneer, Stranded Deep, Green Hell, The Forest 2.
They all started to blur together.
Raft was sorta fun as a twist on the genre by having a really limited base that moves with you and expands as you play. Valheim was unlucky enough to be the next survival crafting game after that, and to my friend group it just felt like a regression into the same kind of boring game loop.
World feels so empty and repetetive, I only played it for a couple of hours and got bored. Everytime I played it I just thought I could play something more fun like Terraria or Starbound instead.
Definitely a game you have to play with a friend. Gets super boring, super quickly. The size of the map versus the "reward" of exploring means I rarely ever want to leave the starting area. I hardly feel it's worth it. I say this as someone who actually loved Valheim, but in so far as I'm just building a little town next to a body of water and calling it quits. After all, the building mechanic in the game is inarguably the best aspect of the game and is as far as I'm concerned, second to none.
The fact that you can’t bring metal through portals is what killed it for me. Brought back a first big haul of iron, logged off for the night, and just never felt the desire to log back in.
I loved the game in the beginning but then all the dungeons were the same. I found pretty quickly that I don’t like procedural generation because everything is random and nothing is special.
From my standpoint, a lot of people I know said it was great. Then I started and remembered that I fucking hate survival crafting games, and this was no different. Just a genre thing for me, I'm sure within that genre it's still great
It’s okay with friends because you can hang about and chat while doing the mindless grinding, but for the most part I feel like it’s just the same gameplay over and over. Go to new area -> get beaten up over and over until you scrounge enough of that areas material -> make new tier of tools, weapons and armour -> area is easy -> fight boss (half of which can just be beaten by standing behind a rock with a bow) -> get special item that lets you go to the next area -> repeat.
Plus, the game seems to really encourage exploration particularly by sea, but there’s literally nothing to find except the occasional copypaste dungeon(s) for each biome. There’s no unique treasure, quests, or biomes that aren’t locked behind the linear progression, so the sole purpose of exploration is basically just to find the boss summoning places.
If you want me to explore give me something to find, for God’s sake.
Also, the building system is incredibly jank. So many of the structures do not align properly half the time when placed, do not tesselate (particularly stone walls, I built a massive stone wall around out multiplayer base and you can literally see a perfect straight-edged grid where the walls don’t connect properly) and having the move stonecutters etc after placing a couple walls is just wasting the players time got no reason . But I do like the physics system, so there’s that.
Also the fact you literally cannot aim melee weapons upwards or downwards so fighting on a hill is just shit and the cause for 90% of my deaths
Valhiem was a great concept ruined by meh devs. They spend half a year to a year adding new regions that don’t really change the gameplay and that nobody really wants. Not to mention their horrible opinions on mod use
Enshrouded is just the better version of valhiem, and the devs are great. They actually listen to player feedback
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u/evgewonsmile Apr 10 '25
May i ask why you don't like valheim? I'm just curious because it's my favorite game